musings by michelle

I think we are a bit obsessed with floating shelves. We used them a lot in our previous (teeny) home for obvious reasons (space, or lack thereof!)… but now we just really love them. I think we have them installed in every room of the main floor of our house.

I had been wanting to build this magnificent and modern/industrial shelving unit for our living room to put our TV on. I was inspired by this. I had priced it all out, drawn sketches, taken measurements, etc. But the $350-ish price tag for materials and the amount of work it was going to take to assemble it… well, life seemed to get in the way of that actually happening. So I found new inspiration that seemed a lot easier and cheaper – this pin on Pinterest.

So three $20 shelves from IKEA and less than an hour of labor transformed our living room and now we have this:

It saved us from having to buy an expensive TV wall mount, and it provides much-needed shelf space for some decorative items and plants. And my husband did such an amazing job hiding all the cords, don’t you think? He found these gems (in white) at the hardware store, it allowed us to hide most of the cords for the TV, XBox, and stereo. They just drop through behind the drywall. That middle basket on the floor is actually hiding all the cords, outlet, and a subwoofer.

Even though there will always be a small part of me lusting after pipe shelving, we should have done this ages ago!